Today we have a real treat: a drop in by talented, prize-winning poet, Jenny Mitchell to reflect on a poem from her amazing Map of a Plantation(Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2021).

It won’t be easy for me to write about Map of a Plantation, the title poem of my second collection, mainly because I don’t know where it came from or why I decided to write it. I think that happens with lots of poems – they simply appear unbidden and, apart from a few tweaks, seem to write themselves.

I can say that the poem Map of a Plantation and the collection come out of my many years of research into British transatlantic enslavement. The research not only changed my outlook on this country’s history, but increased my confidence and led me on a path back to poetry, a form I really thought I had abandoned forever.

My…